


Memories

by CorviDeus



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Lucifer's Cage, Sam's hallucinations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 10:51:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4957498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorviDeus/pseuds/CorviDeus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In general, humans only live eighty, ninety years, at best, and their brains fail before the end.<br/>Memory capacity in humans, therefore, cannot even begin to cope with the weight of millennia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memories

**Author's Note:**

> Sam said at some point in Season 6 that three minutes on Earth was a week in the Cage. So eighteen months would have been a little less than 5000 years. I tend to go by that timeline for the cage, even though most people think 180 years is more accurate, based on Dean's time in regular Hell.

In general, humans only live eighty, ninety years, at best, and their brains fail before the end.  
Memory capacity in humans, therefore, cannot even begin to cope with the weight of millennia.

Demons, and angels, cope with the weakness by keeping themselves slightly apart from their vessels, by not caring about the inevitable damage when they leave, fixing their borrowed brain tissue if it corrupts too far while they still occupy it.  
Sam Winchester had no such luxury.

The wall came down, and five thousand years of memories from his soul flooded Sam’s physical brain. He was lucky not to have an aneurysm immediately, or suffer brain death and wind up on life support in some dank hospital somewhere, with Dean uselessly standing vigil for the rest of their lives.  
But he didn’t, and his brain learned to cope.

Most of the memories he simply lost, his mind rejecting the weight, throwing them away until the load became bearable.  
The remainder were uselessly jumbled.  
The truth was, Sam didn’t know any more than anyone else what had happened to him in the cage. His memories were too fragmented, too corrupted, to be trusted, and the hallucinations were self-contradictory, and, Sam suspected, born as much of his own self-loathing as anything that had really happened.

There had been pain. Lucifer had been there. Michael had been there.  
Well, yes. That wasn't as helpful as it sounded, wasn't nearly as specific as Sam would have liked.

When Sam focused, he remembered pain. He remembered his skin burning. He remembered screams and fire and a few images that couldn’t be anything other than an Archangel’s true form; which one Sam wasn’t sure.  
He remembered Lucifer, but not doing anything in particular. Singing, and not the nails-on-a-blackboard voice of the hallucination. Real, beautiful singing, something Sam knew he missed without truly remembering.  
He remembered being held.  
He remembered talking to the Cage’s other residents, but not anything was said.

He remembered enough to know something was missing now.

 

This is how it happened.

The Cage was a desert, a blank landscape of flashing lights and unearthly screams, two comets slamming into each other and raining down blood that glowed as it fell and on contact, burned Sam's skin like acid. He was thirsty, mouth dry and body slowly weakening in an empty expanse with not a drop of water or a bite of food anywhere. It took days, almost four days of sitting in the dry, dark desert, watching Michael and Lucifer rip at each other, before Sam's physical body, which should never have been in Hell to begin with, gave out through the sheer lack of subsistence available in a dimension it was never designed for. Adam died hours before Sam, and the taller man was too exhausted to feel envy.

After Sam's slow death by dehydration, he was simply a soul.

He floated towards the ceiling of the cage, which meant past the warring angels, despite his floundering attempts to sink back towards the floor. He bumped off the seals and along the roof, his soul presumably trying to reach Heaven but trapped by the Cage as much as the rest of the inhabitants.

From here, it was impossible not to be caught in the crossfire. He didn’t think the two angels had even noticed him, doubted they would care if they did, so he tried, in vain, to control his soul's movements enough to fly away. It was like being a helium balloon and floating through honey, and soon Sam simply gave up and prayed for it to end. They were like moons colliding, and Sam was such a tiny thing.

Eventually their rage subsided, and one of them- Lucifer- took notice of the tiny soul trembling in pain and clinging to the ceiling above. Flying closer, he coaxed Sam into letting Lucifer take him away from the roof, into his embrace, and began to heal the layers upon layers of damage his and Michael’s fighting had caused.  
If Castiel thought Sam’s soul looked skinned alive when it finally returned to Earth, he wouldn’t have had words for it at this point.

The work was slow, and frustrating. Lucifer was not a healer, quite the opposite in fact, and the work was delicate. But he was patient, and they had millennia to themselves and little else to do.

Michael had taken one look at Sam and flown away, to give Lucifer a chance to fix the little soul, or to look for Adam. Neither of them knew, or cared.

When Lucifer thought Sam was able to cope with being returned to a body, he flew down to look for the vessel.  
None of them had noticed it missing until then. It was a mystery that was never solved. Adam’s bones were nearby, pitted and broken from the destruction that had radiated through the Cage for years after the human's deaths, but still some part of them remained. Eventually Michael returned with the younger human’s soul and replaced it in his healed vessel. Michael conjured food and water, and easily kept Adam safe, and alive.

Sam had to make do being a soul.

It wasn’t so bad, most days. He had trouble making Adam understand him, and thinking too much about being a beach ball instead of human-shaped left him nauseous and shaky until Lucifer calmed him down, but there were benefits, too. No vessel meant nothing for Lucifer to want from Sam, other than his company. It meant Sam could talk to, could trust the Archangel without feeling manipulated, without being on his guard.  
It meant they could form a friendship, and then something more, as much as they could in their formless states.

When Death came for Sam it was without warning, without as much as a word to Lucifer or to Sam himself. One minute, Lucifer was singing to Sam in Enochian, the next, a being appeared that should not have been there, in a form that really did hurt Sam to look upon. The next, Sam had been taken from Lucifer and shoved into a tiny, dark bag. He could hear Lucifer roaring, outside, could hear Michael’s demands to be set free, but Death turned his back on the two Archangels and left without a word.

And then Sam remembered nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> ... I don't even know where I was going with this.


End file.
